Author: Jesper

Microsoft Visual Studio as a Game

A team at Microsoft has created a gamification (if you will) extension for Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio Achievements, which adds points for various Visual Studio actions. Full video about it at this link.

As you can tell, it’s on the ironic side of things, but it comes complete with a leaderboard.

Ars Technica has done us the favor of reviewing Visual Studio as a game, perhaps not the funniest post ever, but still.

The gameplay can be very uneven. Some play sessions are an exercise in frustration. It can be difficult to even create a dungeon in the first place, and the game gives few indications of what you’re doing wrong. When it comes to hunting down the monsters within the dungeon, you’re really on your own. But the experience can also be rich and rewarding. The spell-casting system is enormously flexible and varied, and the resulting constructions can be exquisite.

It’s all very Jesse Schell, but I think it points what to we could call the game-vs-tool problem inherent in the idea of gamification: it’s perfectly fine for a game to set up an arbitrary point system, because that then is what matters in the game.

But when I am programming, I am the one who knows that is or isn’t important in what I am trying to do, and somebody else’s point system is likely to be in conflict with my own personal goals.

The Rise of the Word “Gamer”

People often ask me about the origin of the idea of the “gamer”, as something that you may or may not identify as.

I discussed this kind of “I am/am not a (casual) gamer” posturing briefly in A Casual Revolution, but what about the word itself?

Here is the Google Ngram viewer showing the frequency of the word gamer from 1900 to the present day.

I suppose the graph at first looks like what you would expect, but note how “gamer” only really becomes popular from 1990 and on – it was rarely used in relation to arcade games or early home computer games.

On a personal note this also explains why I never wondered that hard about whether I was or wasn’t a gamer: the word only became popular after my formative game-playing years in the 1980’s…

 

PS. Why is the curve flattening around 2005? Could it be that the rise of casual games is making the question moot?

Gamestudies 11/03 is out

For your theoretical pleasure, here is the latest issue of Game Studies: Game Studies 2011-03.

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A Survey of First-person Shooters and their Avatars
by Michael Hitchens
A survey of over 550 first person shooters, The titles are compared by year of release, platform and game setting. Characteristics of avatars within the surveyed titles are also examined, including race, gender and background, and how these vary across platform and time. The analysis reveals definite trends, both historically and by platform…

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Against Procedurality
by Miguel Sicart
This article proposes a critical review of the literature on procedural rhetoric, from a game design perspective. The goal of the article is to show the limits of procedural rhetorics for the design and analysis of ethics and politics in games. The article will suggest that theories of play can be used to solve these theoretical flaws…

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The pastoral and the sublime in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
by Paul Martin
The landscape in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is seen here as a central aspect of the game’s theme of good versus evil. The analysis looks at the game’s distinction between the pastoral and the industrial realms and the way the player’s encounter with the landscape transforms over the course of the game from the sublime to the picturesque mode…

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Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams: Popular Music, Narrative, and Dystopia in Bioshock
by William Gibbons
The science-fiction world of the video game Bioshock (2K Games, 2007) presents a dystopian vision of mid-century America. The game explores the creation and ultimate destruction of the underwater city of Rapture, an Ayn-Rand-inspired capitalist Utopia. Though the game features an award-winning original score, its soundtrack also borrows…

NYU Game Center 2-year Master Program Fall 2012

Phew. Lots of work has lead up to this, but here at the New York University Game Center, we can finally announce that we are launching a 2-year MFA Degree in Game Design starting the Fall of 2012.

http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate

Full announcement below.

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NYU Game Center to Offer  MFA Degree in Game Design

Beginning Fall 2012

New York University has announced that the NYU Game Center, one of the world’s leading academic game programs, will offer a new Masters of Fine Arts degree beginning in Fall 2012.  MFA students will explore games as a creative art form as they design and develop games within a context of rigorous scholarly study in the two-year program at the NYU Game Center.

The curriculum includes game design, game programming, visual design for games, and game criticism. The program is distinctive in looking at games across a wide variety of media, from consoles and PCs to smartphones and social networks. Over the course of two years, students will find their voices as creative practitioners working on individual and group projects, as they study the theoretical and cultural aspects of games, all within the thriving community that is the NYU Game Center. For more detailed information, visit: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate.

“Games are the defining cultural form of this century and the NYU Game Center MFA is dedicated to exploring their potential,” says Director Frank Lantz, “There are places to study the technical and business aspects of games, but the Game Center MFA has a unique creative focus on games for today’s platforms.”

The NYU Game Center features a roster of world-class faculty, including:

  • Director Frank Lantz, well-known game designer and successful entrepreneur, an instructor at NYU for nearly two decades
  • Katherine Isbister, acclaimed researcher whose work on players was cited in Forbes, Wired, Scientific American, and NPR’s Science Friday this year
  • Jesper Juul, leading game scholar and theorist whose most recent book was selected by New Yorker magazine as one of the 5 essential books on games
  • Eric Zimmerman, veteran game designer who recently exhibited work at MoMA and co-authored the most widely-used textbook on game design

The NYU Game Center houses one of the world’s largest collections of videogames, and offers a busy schedule of exhibitions, tournaments, and lectures, including the annual PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail conference.

The Game Center MFA was created by Tisch in close affiliation with NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and NYU Poly. Together with efforts like the Games for Learning Institute and the NYU Poly Game Innovation Lab, the Game Center MFA makes NYU a global leader in games.

Apply now: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate. Deadline March 1.

The Casual Revolution in RIFT

Over at Joystiq, Karen Bryan is using some of the concepts from A Casual Revolution to discuss what is happening in RIFT: Enter at Your Own Rift: The casual revolution in RIFT.

It’s spot on in terms of picking up what I was thinking when I wrote the book, but then she is using it to discuss MMOs (and the development in a particular MMO),  something that I had not really thought the book to be about.

But that’s what’s so interesting (and a little scary) about writing theory: someone picks up on what you were thinking and applies it to something you hadn’t thought about … and what I wrote no longer belongs to me, but acquires all the meanings that is being put into it by other people. As it should be.